Magit vs TortoiseGit
When comparing Magit vs TortoiseGit, the Slant community recommends Magit for most people. In the question“What are the best Git clients for Windows?” Magit is ranked 6th while TortoiseGit is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Magit is:
Simple tasks, such as commits, can quickly be made without leaving the editor.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Uninterrupted workflow for common tasks
Simple tasks, such as commits, can quickly be made without leaving the editor.
Pro Diffs are easy
Since it's integrated with Emacs, diffs are very easy to fix. You can jump right to any file you want to fix as soon as it comes up in the logs or in the status view.
Pro Easy to remember mnemonics
You can easily learn the mnemonics for the most common tasks and use them to your advantage to speed up your workflow.
Pro Better visualization and interactive workflow
Pro Stage hunks or even just parts of a hunk using a single key press
In Magit staging a hunk or even just part of a hunk is very easy.
Magit also implements several other "apply variants" in addition to staging and unstaging. For example: you can also discard or reverse a change, or apply it to the working tree.
Pro Blame information can be viewed inline with the file
Pro Multiple buffers are used to show contextual information
Pro Powerful rebasing
Pro Available in Homebrew
brew install magit
Pro Open source
Licensed under GPL.
Pro Windows context menu integration
Context menu enables access to common commands quickly.
Pro Can parse and provide a pretty log of all commits or filter by branch
Pro Convinient blaming tool
Very friendly blame tool. Easy to walk in the history of a file.
Cons
Con Useful only for people who use Emacs
Magit is only useful if your text editor of choice is Emacs. It wouldn't really make any sense to open up emacs just to run Magit if you use another editor.
Con Windows only
No Linux or OSX versions available.
Con Renames git commands
Makes things hard to find for people used to the git CLI.
Con Buggy file status icons
The file icons are also often buggy and do not reflect its true status. Often times the icon is missing and makes you think a file or folder is untracked, when it is already staged, or sometimes even already committed and pushed.
Con May clutter your Windows Explorer
If you have synced your dev folder to a cloud service, TortoiseGit's git status file icons will override your cloud provider's icons.
Con No support for staging
It does not support staging in any way. You'll never guess that this feature is exist in git.